An earlier
version was presented at the All-UC Multicampus Research Unit in World History
conference, UCLA December 6-7, 2003.(10522 words) Thanks to Guillermo Algaze, Claudio Cioffi, Jerry Cooper
and Peter Peregrine for comments on an earlier version.

v. 12-8-03

Introduction

This
paper presents an overview of the development of complex and hierarchical
societies in ancient Southwestern Asia from a comparative world-systems
perspective, and presents an analysis of the timing of urban and empire
growth/decline cycles in Mesopotamia and Egypt to test the hypotheses that
these two regions may have experienced waves of development synchronously. We
also discuss how climate change may have influenced the patterns of
development.In a nutshell our argument
is that there have been systemic relations among different peoples since at
least the first human settlements by the Natufians some twelve thousand years
ago (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). The developmental logic of these intersocietal
systems have changed over time as new techniques of power and institutions have
emerged but there are also broad continuities and similar patterns over
millennia as world-systems became larger.This paper utilizes the conceptual apparatus of the comparative
world-systems perspective to examine the patterns of development in prehistoric
and ancient Western Asia. Thus we speak of strong core polities and weaker and
dependent peripheral societies, as well as societies in the middle, which we
call semiperipheral. And we bound systems by using interaction networks in
which important, two-way and regular interaction links peoples with different
cultures. This network approach to bounding world-system is explicated in
Chase-Dunn and Jorgenson (2003).

We
contend that some of the peoples who were semiperipheral in the ancient
world-systems were the main agents that brought about the transformations of
developmental logics. We also contend that the formation, differentiation, and
development of nomadic peoples in tandem with sedentary states and empires
played a crucial role.Nomads were
often the catalysts of systemic change in these early state-based world-systems.
This research paper builds on studies by David Wilkinson (2000), William R.
Thompson (2000. n.d.), and Guillermo Algaze (1993, 2000a, 2000b).

Karl
Butzer (1997) contends, with respect to Levantine development processes, that
the existence of cycles is prima facie evidence of some sort of
system.We have noted that all
world-systems large and small exhibit cycles of expansion and contraction of
trade networks, which we call pulsation.Furthermore, once chiefdoms emerge there is another cycle appears,
the rise and fall of large polities.

Following the work of David Wilkinson, we note that
the Mesopotamian and Egyptian interstate systems merged around 1500 BCE to
become a single larger system of states that we call the Central System.And about 1500 years earlier, around 3000
BCE, long-distance prestige good trade connected these two regions.As these mergers occurred it might be
expected that growth/decline phases in the two regions would become synchronous.
Indeed we have found an important instance of this kind of synchrony between
East and West Asia that emerged around 500 BCE and lasted until around 1500 CE
(Chase-Dunn, Manning, and Hall 2000; Chase-Dunn and Manning).

One
area worthy of further examination is the effects of climate change on patters
of social development. Brian Fagan (1999) contends that it was sudden climate
changes and natural disasters that provoked humans to invent new forms of
social organization. Bill Thompson has argued (n.d.: Figure 1] that climate
change may affect social systems in complex, and at times contradictory,
ways.

Pulsation, Rise and Fall and Semiperipheral
Development in the Southwestern Asian System

In
this paper we mainly focus on Southwestern Asia and the Mediterranean Levant.
The time period under consideration is from the emergence of mesolithic
sedentism (about 10,000 BCE) to the point at which the growing Southwestern
Asian political/military network (PMN) became linked with the Egyptian PMN by
the Hyksos conquest of Egypt (about 1500 BCE).We will examine the hypothesis of semiperipheral transformative action
in the context of a discussion of the processes of polity-formation,
technological change, the rise and fall of larger polities, the pulsation of
interaction networks and the transformation of the very logic of social
integration from kin-based normative regulation to state-based
institutionalized coercion.The
hypothesis of semiperipheral development asserts that semiperipheral regions
in core-periphery hierarchies are fertile sites for innovation and the
implementation of new institutions that sometimes allow societies in these
regions to be upwardly mobile and/or to transform the scale (and sometimes the
qualitative nature) of institutional structures.This is not simply the notion that core traits diffuse toward the
periphery. It is rather the idea that semiperipheral innovation enables upward
mobility and occasionally transforms whole systems. Semiperipheral actors have
taken different forms in different systems. Semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms
and semiperipheral marcher states conquer older core states to form a new
core-wide polity. Semiperipheral capitalist city-states exploit an opportunity
to accumulate wealth based on trade and the production of commodities. And in
the modern world-system it is semiperipheral nation states that have risen to
become the hegemonic within still multicentric cores. This notion is further
explicated in Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997: Chapter 5).

The
hypothesis of semiperipheral development presumes a cross-cultural
conceptualization of core/periphery hierarchies in which more powerful
societies importantly interact with less powerful ones. The idea of
core/periphery hierarchy was originally developed to describe and account for
the stratified relations of power and dependency among societies in the modern
world-system. The comparative world-systems approach developed by Chase-Dunn
and Hall (1997) distinguishes between core/periphery differentiation, in
which there is important interaction among societies that have different
degrees of population density, and core/periphery hierarchy in which
some societies are exercising domination or exploitation of other societies. It
is not assumed that all world-systems have core/periphery relations. Rather
this is turned into a research question to be determined in each case.

The 8500 year period from
10,000 BCE to 1500 BCE in Western Asia witnessed a series of fundamental
pristine transformations in the nature of human societies: the original
Mesolithic emergence sedentary diversified foraging (the first dwellers in
permanent villages), the Neolithic invention and application of farming, the
emergence of the first hierarchical chiefdoms, the first multi-tier settlement
systems, and eventually the first cities and states. The Southwest Asian
world-system developed the first relatively stable core/periphery hierarchy in
which imperial core states exploited and dominated peripheral peoples.This region also witnessed the first instance
of a core-wide empire resulting from the conquest of a set of older core states
– the Akkadian Empire. As will be seen, our earlier characterization of this as
an instance of a semiperipheral marcher state erecting a pristine empire
(Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: 84-89) needs to be modified in some important
respects.

What follows is an analytic
narrative about the development of social complexity and hierarchy in
prehistoric and ancient Southwestern Asia and the Levant. The rapid and
dramatic emergence of states, cities and writing in the West Asian system in
the fourth millennium BCE was built upon a set of prior developments that
spread from the adjacent Levant over the previous five thousand years. The
metaphor of ecological succession is relevant for understand the evolution of
world-systems. Small plants breaking down rocks create soil. This produces what
is necessary for larger plants and trees to grow. The analogue of soil is
socially produced surplus and the institutional structures that allow human
societies to become larger and more hierarchical. But as with ecological
succession, this is not a smooth upward accession from small to large.
Regressions and collapses were frequent, and the areas in which the first
break-throughs occurred are most usually not the same locations in which later,
larger-scale developments emerged. It was a process of temporally and spatially
uneven socialdevelopment. The institutional soil first formed in the
prehistoric Levant and then spread to ancient Southwestern Asia.

The Hilly Flanks

The Mesolithic invention of
relatively permanent village life was made possible by a diversified foraging
strategy that mixed the gathering of vegetable resources, fishing and hunting
of small game. This developed in a context in which the villagers continued to
cooperate and compete with more nomadic hunter-gatherers. The Natufian culture
of the Levant is the earliest known example of Mesolithic sedentism based on
diversified foraging – this around 9000 BCE (Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen 1991;
Moore 1982).[1]
Sedentary foragers probably invented territorial boundaries as well as a more
active intervention in the productive cycles of nature. In other regions
diversified foragers are know to have used fire to increase the growth of
food-producing plants and grazing areas attractive to game. These activities
have been termed "protoagriculture" (Bean and Lawton 1976). A similar
Mesolithic culture, dated to around 8650 BCE, has been found at Shanidar Cave
and village sites in the Zagros Mountains on a tributary of the Tigris (Solecki
and Solecki 1982).

In the smaller valleys in the
hills adjacent to the prime gathering regions of the Natufian peoples naturally
occurring stands of grain were less productive.It is plausible that when the nomads in these neighboring regions
tried to emulate the sedentary life-style of the mesolithic villagers, they
found those natural stands were quickly eaten up, and so they experimented with
planting the seeds that they had gathered. The proto-horticulture of the
diversified foragers may have been transformed into true horticulture and the
domestication of useful plants by the adjacent neighbors of the original
sedentary foragers (Hayden 1981). The further archaeological study of the
spread of diversified foraging and gardening will enable us to test this
hypothesis. It may be that the first instance of semiperipheral development was
the emergence of a new productive technology (planting) in a region adjacent to
one in which an earlier new departure had occurred (sedentism).

The techniques of gardening spread
both west into the valley of the Nile and east toward Mesopotamia. Gardening
increased the number of people that could be supported by a given area of land
making greater population density possible. Community sizes grew in
rain-watered regions and population growth led to the migration of farmers away
from the original heartland of gardening.Horticultural techniques also diffused from group to group and were
combined with the domestication of pigs, sheep and goats. This was the
Neolithic “revolution.” Still-nomadic hunter-gatherers traded with the
Neolithic towns, and a new form of pastoral nomadism developed based on the
herding of domesticated animals

The simple model here is that
technological development increased population density and this facilitated the
emergence of social hierarchies. There is evidence from the Chesapeake region
of indigenous North America that migration of planters or in situ adoption of planting does not always immediately lead to
greater complexity and hierarchy (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1999). It appears that
the arrival of corn planting in the Chesapeake allowed the “mesolithic”
diversified foragers living in rather large villages to redisperse into widely
spread farmlets and to reduce the intensity of their trading and ritual
symbolization of group identity and social hierarchy. So technological change
can, under some conditions, lead to deconcentration and less social
hierarchy.This possibility needs to be
kept in mind as we examine the spread of gardening across Southwestern Asia.

As villages eventually grew
larger, trade networks did as well and craft specialists began producing for
export and importing raw materials.Trade networks probably expanded and contracted along different spatial
dimensions, as was the case in other small-scale world-systems (Chase-Dunn and
Mann 1998).It is known that obsidian
(volcanic glass) was an important lithic material for the production of cutting
tools and weapons in regions adjacent to the Levant and Southwestern Asia
(Torrence 1986). Obsidian tools and debitage (waste materials that are
by-products of tool making) can be chemically fingerprinted so that the
original quarries can be identified. And obsidian hydration rinds can be used
as an indicator of the period in which the tool was formed. These techniques
can be used to indicate the patterns of obsidian trade and procurement networks
and how they changed over time.Similar
methods are also available for some other lithic materials. These techniques
have not been fully exploited for studying the emergence and pulsation of
trading networks in the prehistoric Levant and Southwestern Asia.

Some regions began displaying
mortuary practices that indicated the emergence of social stratification. In
Northern Mesopotamia a degree of hierarchy is evident in the Hassuna/Samarra
archaeological tradition from 6000 BCE to 5500 BCE.Precious minerals were traded over larger and larger regions, and
regionally defined pottery styles developed. The Halafian archaeological
tradition in Northern Mesopotamia (5500 BCE-5000 BCE) had quite large villages
and some have argued that these were chiefdoms.

To the Flood Plain

According to Nissen (1988:
Chapter 3) the first three-tiered settlement system in Southwest Asia emerged
on the Susiana Plain (in what is now Iran adjacent to the Mesopotamian flood
plain) in the Ubaid period (5500-4000 BCE).This would indicate the presence of complex chiefdoms, and Wright (1986)
points to the importance of the existence of complex chiefdoms in a region as
the necessary organizational prerequisite for the emergence of pristine
states.In other words, first states do
not emerge directly from egalitarian societies. Evidence from Uqair, Eridu and
Ouelli shows that there were also Ubaid sites on the Lower Mesopotamian flood
plain that were as large as the sites on the Susiana Plain at this time. The
Early Ubaid phase at Tell Ouelli shows remarkably complex architecture as early
as anything on the Susiana Plain. Thus there was an interregional interaction
system of chiefdoms based on a mix of rain-watered and small-scale irrigated
agriculture.

In the next period(Uruk or Late Chalcolithic from 4000-3100
BCE) the first true city(Uruk) grew up
on the floodplain of lower Mesopotamia, and other cities of similar large size
soon emerged in adjacent locations.Surrounding these unprecedented large cities were smaller towns and
villages that formed the first four-tiered settlement systems (Adams 1981).
This was the original birth of “civilization” understood as the combination of
irrigated agriculture, writing, cities and states.[2]
States also emerged somewhat later in the Uruk period on the Susiana Plain
(Wright 1998 and these also developed four-tiered settlement systems (Flannery
1998:17). This was an instance of uneven development-- the transition from an inter-regional interchiefdom system to
an inter-city-state system that emerged first in Mesopotamia and then spread to
the adjacent Susiana plain.

A System of States: the Temple and the Palace

The main architectural feature
of these new cities was the temple and this structure has long been considered
the primary institution of a theocratically organized political economy.Later evidence about Sumerian civilization
shows that each city was represented by a god in the Sumerian pantheon and the
priests and populace were defined as the slaves of the city god – this
justifying the accumulation of surplus product (Postgate 1992).Flannery (1998) claims that even the
earliest archaic states often also had palaces – residential buildings for the
war-leader king.But in Mesopotamia
most scholars think that palaces were a later development that emerged when
competitive warfare among the city-states for the control of land and trade
routes became more frequent.Congruent
with this is the evidence that shows an implosion of population from
surrounding towns and villages to live within the protected confines of walled
cities (Adams 1981). Thus was the early“peer polity” or “early state module” (Renfrew 1986) of co-evolving
archaic states transformed into an intercity-state system of warring and
allying states.

This transition from theocracy
to the primacy of a warrior king was an important development in the emergence
of state-based modes of accumulation.The Sumerian cities erected their states –specialized institutions of
regional control – over the tops of kin-based normative institutions (Zagarell
1986). Assemblies of lineage heads long continued to play an important role in
the politics of Mesopotamia. But the structures of institutional coercion
became ever more important for maintaining power and accumulating wealth. One
interesting apparent difference between the emergences of archaic states in
Mesopotamia from other instances of pristine state formation is the apparent absence
of ritual human sacrifice.A powerful
way to dramatize the power of a king is to bury a lot of other people with him
when he dies. Except for the EDIII period in the royal cemetery at Ur, there is
little evidence of human sacrifice in Mesopotamia.The temple economy required contributions of goods and labor
time, including animal sacrifices that were consumed in religious feasts.But the sacrifice of humans in Mesopotamia
was, as with modern states, mainly confined to killing in battle.

The story of the Uruk expansion
is well known, though its exact nature remains controversial (Algaze 1993,
2000; Stein 1999).The emerging cities
of Mesopotamia founded colonies and colonial enclaves within existing towns
across a vast region in order to gain access to desired goods and to control
trade routes (Algaze 1993; 2000).There
is some disagreement as to the degree of direct control that these core
city-states[3] were
able to exercise over distant peripheral regions.

Archaeologist Gil Stein’s (1999) confrontation of
world-systems ideas with evidence was inspired by the work of Phil Kohl (1987a,
1992). What Stein has done is to go beyond Kohl to formulate testable
alternative models of core/periphery relationships. His “distance-parity” model
is a major conceptual improvement over earlier work. And Stein’s careful
research at Hacinebe (on the Tigris in Turkey) has gone far to enlighten us
about the true nature of Uruk trading stations in that part of the world.

Despite
Stein’s critical appraisal of the comparative world-systems approach, his work
confirms what Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) have argued, that core/periphery
hierarchies in early state-based world-systems were limited in spatial scale
and relatively unstable. Early states were not able to extract resources from
distant peripheries because they were unable to project military power very far
and they did not have elaborated capitalistic mechanisms for facilitating
unequal exchange.

Joyce Marcus’s (1998) study of early states points
out that the interstate system of Mesopotamia exhibited a cycle of “rise and
fall” in which the largest polities increase and then decrease in size, and
that this phenomenon is also known in other cases of ancient state systems in
the Andes and Mesoamerica.Indeed, all
hierarchical world-systems exhibit a structurally similar cycle -- from the
“cycling” of chiefdoms (Anderson 1994) to the rise and fall of great empires,
and the rise and fall of hegemonic core states in the modern world-system.

Figure 1 graphs the territorial
sizes of the largest states and empires in Mesopotamia from 3000 BCE to 1000
BCE as estimated by Taagepera (1978a, 1978b). The rise and fall phenomenon can
clearly be seen. Also the great size of Akkadian empire (6.5 square megametres)
was not equaled again until 800 BCE by the Neo-Assyrians, who then went on to
create a state that ruled 14 square megametres in 650 BCE. This was a new level
of political integration of territory more than twice the size of the Akkadian
empire. We also have data on the sizes of many of the largest cities in
Mesopotamia.The Pearson’s r
correlation coefficient for the relationship between Mesopotamian largest city
and empire sizes based on 13 time points from 2800 to 650 BCE is .59. This
indicates that, as would be expected, large empires build large cities and the
processes that cause growth and decline phases affect both urbanization and empire
formation.[4]

David
Wilkinson (2000) has coded the power configuration sequence of the ancient
Southwest Asian state system from Early Dynastic II through the Kassite-Hurrain
period. Wilkinson conceptualizes state systems in terms of a sequence of power
configurations and we have recoded these in terms of degrees of centralization
of power:

6: universal state (one superpower, no great powers, no more than two
local

powers)

5 : hegemony (either one superpower, no great powers, three or more

local powers; or no superpowers, one great power, no more than one
local

power)

4:unipolar (all other
configurations with one superpower)

3:bipolar (two great powers)

2 : tripolar (three great powers)

1:multipolar (more than three great powers)

0 : nonpolar (no great
powers)

It is
reasonable to suppose that power configurations should be positively correlated
over time with the territorial size of the largest empire. Figure 2 confirms
this correlation for ancient Southwest Asian system.[5]

Figure 2:
Power Configurations and the Territorial Size of the Largest Empire

The Jemdet Nasr and Early
Dynastic periods saw the further growth of cities in Mesopotamia and seven
centuries of an intercity-state system with the rise and fall of hegemonic core
states but no successful formation of a core-wide empire.This sequence is quite different from what
happened in Egypt, where the emergence of monumental cities and large-scale
agriculture led to much larger territorial states, and very soon to a core-wide
empire (see Figure 4 below).[6]
The explanations for these differences have long been alleged to be ecological,
having to do with the differences in the communications and transportation
possibilities in the two regions. Whereas the Nile is a single and quite
navigable river both upstream and downstream, the Tigris and the Euphrates are
much less navigable, and so communications and trade routes are more complex in
Mesopotamia. In Egypt a state can easily get effective control of the entire
agricultural heartland by controlling movement on the Nile, while in
Mesopotamia central control of flows of information and goods is much more
difficult to gain (Mann 1986).Thus the
process of empire building took much longer in Southwest Asia than it did in
Egypt (See Figure 4 below).

This ecological explanation is
now often disparaged by those who compare Mesopotamia and Egypt (e.g. Baines
and Yoffee 1998) in favor of cultural differences that may have led to the
differences in political organization. But it is equally plausible that the
cultural differences were themselves consequences of ecological and political
structures. In Egypt the temple economy last far longer before it was
transformed into state led by a warrior-king because early empire formation
along the Nile was not challenged by adjacent strong states. In Mesopotamia
each of the city-states needed to constantly defend its sovereignty from
competing adjacent states. Many of the cultural differences between the two
regions are due to these ecological and geopolitical differences.

Sargon

Though there were several
efforts by powerful states to conquer the whole core region of Mesopotamia,
this goal was not reached until the emergence of the Akkadian Empire in 2350
BCE.Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997: 84-89)
presented a case for this first core-wide empire as an instance of a
semiperipheral marcher state conquest.This was based on the notion that the Akkadian-speaking conquerors were
recently settled nomadic pastoralists in Northern Mesopotamia who used elements
of political organization and military technology stemming from there formerly
peripheral origins to conquer the old core city-states and erect a larger
empire.This portrayal is challenged by
evidence that the Akkadian language had long been present in both Northern and
Southern Mesopotamia and that Agade, the capital of the Akkadian Empire was
probably established after the
Sargonic conquest rather than being a city populated by recently settled
ex-nomads (Postgate 1992:36). Though archaeologists have not yet firmly
identified the location of Agade among the thousands of mud-heaps (tells) in
Iraq, it is thought that Agade was built in the northern part of the
Mesopotamian region.

By the time of the Sargonic
conquest the characterization of Northern Mesopotamia as semiperipheral is
problematic. The northern part of the alluvium was more heavily urbanized than
the south (Adams 1981) in the Early Uruk period, but the situation reversed
toward the end of the Uruk period with the exponential growth of Warka. The
north may have had a greater concentration of Akkadian speakers (Postgate
1992:38), but some of the northern cities, (e.g. Kish) had long been among the
contenders for hegemony in the intercity-state system of the Early Dynastic
period. These particulars favor an interpretation of the Akkadian conquest that
is more based on class and ethnic cleavages in Mesopotamia than on the
core/periphery dimension (Yoffee 1991).

The Akkadian regime, called an
"upstart dynasty" by Postgate (1992), made the Akkadian language the
official language of the state and, under Sargon’s son Naram-sin (2291 BCE),
imposed a standardized system of weights and measures across the Mesopotamian
core.After the fall of the Akkadian
dynasty there was a period of disorder in which the Gutians (nomadic people
from the Zagros Mountains) infiltrated the Mesopotamian core region and
contended for power. The north-south dimension of conflict continued to be a
cultural and geopolitical fault-line.The Third Dynasty of Ur (2113 BCE) reasserted southern dominance and
Sumerian culture. David Wilkinson (1991) notes a pattern that he calls
"shuttling" in which centralized power shifted back and forth between
two adjacent regions. This pattern of shuttling rise and fall, now increasingly
composed of multi-city states, characterizes what happened in Southwestern Asia
throughout the rest of the period until the Babylonian Empire and the end of
the period we are studying in this paper. Subsequent Mesopotamian Empires until
1500 BCE were not larger than the Akkadian Empire had been (see Figure 1), and
the location of the most powerful states shuttled back and forth between
Northern and Southern Mesopotamia.

Core and Periphery

The most serious incursions of
peripheral tribes occurred during periods of political disorder in the core
regions. There were probably both “push” and “pull” factors involved in this
pattern of recurrent incursions. Disorder amongst the “civilized” states made
them vulnerable and encouraged interlopers. And nomadic pastoralists and hill
tribes probably had their own organizational dynamics (Hall 1991; 2000). We
know from other areas that nomadic pastoralists have their own cycles of
centralization and decentralization (Barfield 1989).And climate changes affected both the abilities of the agrarian
states to produce food and the abilities of the nomads to raise herds.Thompson (2000: Figure 3) indicates that
there is a fairly good correspondence over time between the size of the largest
Mesopotamian state and the Tigris/Euphrates river levels.This is encouraging for the hypothesis that
climate change is related to rise and fall, and it may be an important factor
in peripheral incursions.

The Amorite tribes were nomadic
pastoralists coming from the deserts of the northwest. In order to prevent
their incursions the Ur III dynasty constructed a Great Wall of Mesopotamia
clear across the northern edge of the core region (Postgate 1992:43).But there were also new invasions from the
east by Elamites and it was a combination of Amorite and Elamite incursions
that led to the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur.There followed the Isin-Larsa period in which small independent
states each had an Amorite ruling house, and the Old Babylonian period that
followed was a system of rather larger multicity states. The Amorite kings of
Babylon, including the famous Hammurapi, expanded their empire until Babylon
was itself conquered in 1595 BCE by a new group of nomadic invaders, the
Hittites, led by Murcilis.

Merchant Capitalism

During these developments trade
networks continued to expand, albeit unevenly. Periods of peace and empire
allow trade to become more intense and goods to travel farther.The commodification of goods and wealth had
long been emerging within and between the states of Mesopotamia. Contracts of
sale of lands and interest-bearing loans were know from the Early Dynastic
period, and prices were clearly reflecting shortages in the Ur III period.In the Old Babylonian period we find a clear
instance of a phenomenon that became more frequent and widespread in the later
commercializing tributary empire systems -- the semiperipheral capitalist
city-state (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997:90-93).[7]This was the Old Assyrian merchant dynasty
based in Assur on the upper Tigris, with its colonial enclaves of Assyrian
merchants located in distant cities far up into Anatolia and beyond (Larsen
1987,1992). Assur was a merchant capitalist city-state with a far-flung set of
colonies in the midst of an interstate system in which most states were still
pursuing a strategy of territorial expansion.

The capitalist city-state
phenomenon is clearly a different kind of semiperipheral development from that
of the semiperipheral marcher state.These states pursued a policy of profit making rather than the
acquisition of territory and the use of state power to tax and extract
tribute.They emerged in the
interstices between the territorial states in world-economies in which wealth
could be had by buying cheap and selling dear (merchant capitalism). One of
their consequences was the expansion of trade networks because their commercial
activities provided incentives for distant producers and accumulators to use
surpluses for trade and to produce surpluses beyond local needs for this purpose.
Thus the capitalist city-states were agents of commodification and the
expansion and intensification of a regional division of labor.

The Old Assyrian merchants,
unlike most capitalist city-states, were not maritime specialists (as were e.g.
the Phoenicians, Venice, Genoa, Malacca, etc.). But they did occupy a key
transportation site that enabled them to tap into profit streams created by the
exchange of eastern tin and Mesopotamian textiles for silver. Bronze was being
produced in Anatolia using copper from the north and tin imported from the
east, probably from regions that are now part of Afghanistan.The demand for tin was great and the
worshippers of Assur were able to profitably insert themselves into this trade
by negotiating treaties with the other states in the region that allowed them
access to markets at agreed upon taxation rates.They also organized and carried out the transportation of goods
over long distances by means of donkey caravans, and they produced an effective
structure of self-governance. This is an early instance of what Philip Curtin
(1984) has called a “trade diaspora,” in which a single cultural group
specializes in cross-cultural trade.[8]

Most of the evidence that we
have about the Old Assyrian city-state and its colonies comes from the Kultepe
tablets at Kanesh, an archive of business records and letters that show how the
Old Assyrians organized and governed their business activities (Veenhof
1995).The records show that these were
merchants trading on their own accounts for profit, not agents of states
carrying out "administered trade" akin to tribute exchanges.Though Karl Polanyi (1957) was wrong about
the Old Assyrians in this regard, his larger perspective on the evolution of
institutional modes of exchange remains an important contribution to our
understanding of the qualitative differences between kin-based, state-based and
market forms of integration. The conquest empire of the Hittites was certainly
a case of the semiperipheral marcher state strategy in which recently settled
nomads overwhelmed an interstate system and created a new and larger empire.

The later history of Assur is
also an interesting case that is relevant for our understanding of
semiperipheral development. The Old Assyrians were conquered by an Amorite
sheik. Their later re-emergence as the Neo-Assyrian empire was a fascinating
instance of a semiperipheral capitalist city-state switching to the marcher
state strategy of conquest,[9]
and their success in this venture created an empire that was larger than any
other that had been before it in Southwestern Asia (see Figure 1).

From Peripherality to Semiperipherality

In
the hinterlands, "beyond the pale" dwelt those labeled
"barbarians," which might be glossed "the not like us"
peoples.What were their relations to
sedentary peoples and how did they change?Much of this will be forever shrouded by the paucity of hard
evidence.Hence we are forced to use
much later sedentary - nomad relations to gain insights into the first
relations.Such ethnographic
"upstreaming" is always hazards, the more so when origins of are the
subject of investigation.Still, we can
posit trading and raiding two ways in which nomadic peoples can interact with
sedentary peoples.Even when the
nomadism is bipedal, nomads have immense advantages over sedentary
peoples:they are fewer, they are
mobile, more importantly, their resources are also mobile, they now their
territory intimately, and their sedentary foes are, literally, sitting
ducks.In fact, the only way raiding
nomads can be subdued is to sedentarize them -- something seldom if ever
possible until last few centuries.

On
the other hand, we learn from Barfield's account that the popular image of
nomads as destroyers is a gross exaggeration.Here one must distinguish between a city or village that is destroyed in
a raid, versus an entire empire which readily outlasts all such raids. Nomads
cannot profit from either raiding or trading with a failing state
because there will be little or nothing to raid or trade for!This is fundamentally what is behind
Barfield's seemingly surprising finding that steppe confederacies were strong
only when China was strong, and weak when it was weak.He does note, however, that things were
often different in West Asia where states were smaller and weaker than
China.While Bronze Age states were
assuredly weaker, so were the various surrounding nomads.

Owen
Lattimore (1968) cites a Chinese proverb to the effect that while one can
conquer from horseback, one cannot rule from there.Whether we are discussing mounted pastoralists, or prehorse
nomads, the principle is the same:To
maintain a conquest over sedentary peoples, nomads must cease being nomads.One of the major problems with ancient
accounts of nomadic incursions is that it is often difficult to tell ay
particular instance was a relatively gradual process of in-migration with new
language coming into dominance, or a military conquest that transformed the
nomadic conquerors into a new dynasty.

The
conventional approach, that nomads conquer weak states, may hold when nomads
essentially overplay their hand of raiding to gain better terms of trade and
then end up running the place, and ceasing to be nomads.This, of course, would be highly remarked in
written records.Whereas, centuries of
intermittent raids, which alternate with trade, would go unremarked.

But
other than accidentally overplaying their raiding, why would nomads conquer
sedentary peoples?There may have been
variants in Western Asia of what William McNeill (1987) has called the Steppe
gradient.There was a tendency for
steppe pastoralists in Central Asia to move westward because the grasses are
better toward the east, so strong nomadic confederations tended to emerge in
the east, near China, displacing losing groups toward the west.There were probably localized versions of
this phenomenon in Western Asia.

This
is one of the ways in which climate change, even relatively small climate
change, can have strong effects.Slight
shifts in rainfall patterns can change considerably the limits of useful
rangeland for pastoralists.If any one
group moves, all their neighbors, sedentary and nomadic, are affected.Here it is important to keep in mind the
volatility of pastoral strategies.An
abundance of grass in just a few seasons can lead to an explosion of herd
sizes, unleashing quest for more pastures.The quest will intensify if the climate turns dryer and grasses become
scarce.This, too, can unleash
migrations and conquests, in which nomads seek to take over farmland for
pastureland.

Here
it is vital to see this as part of a larger system.Farmers and herders utilize different resources and different
ecologies.Typically, but not always,
land that is very suitable for pastoralism is not suitable for farming. This
produces differentiation between farming and herding. Yet neither adaptation is
wholly self-sufficient and this produces incentives for trade.But this type of differentiation readily
turns into hierarchy, since sedentary populations far outnumber pastoral
populations.By trading assorted
"surplus" goods, sedentary peoples encourage nomads to produce a
surplus of meat and animal by- products on land that is often not suitable for
cultivation.

Most
important for our argument about systemness and theentraining of processes across regions, nomads are often a key
link that transmit changes in one region to distant regions.This, of course, was the argument of Frederick
Teggart (1939) in Rome and China. For instance, one can imagine a
state becoming weakened by a dynastic succession struggle.This could undercut the amount of surplus
available for trade, especially with pesky barbarians.Those barbarians then could either step up
raids to acquire what could no longer be obtained by trade, further weakening
the state and undermining the legitimacy of the ruling elite.If this led to a collapse of the agrarian
state nomads might take over and run the state themselves. But unless they had
sufficient numbers, knowledge, and organization this outcome would be rare.[10]
If nomadic peoples are frustrated in their interactions with existing states
they seek elsewhere for necessary goods, and to sell off their surplus.This could start a gradient of clashes that
would ramify far across intervening territories.If no alternatives were available, the nomadic society might
itself experience a secondary collapse in reaction to the agrarian state
collapse.This could actually open new
territory to nomads from elsewhere looking for new pastures. Nomads can also
facilitate or hinder long distance trade between agrarian states. Small nomadic
groups that raid trade caravans make long-distance trade risky and expensive.
But a large nomadic confederation can agree to supply security to merchant
caravan for a fee, making the risks and returns from trade venture much more
calculable. Thus, we can expect some correlation of events between distant
sedentary states and empires due to the transmission belts that nomadic groups
constitute.

Egyptian and Mesopotamian Synchrony?

As the Mesopotamian and
Egyptian cores and their trade networks expanded they came to have more and
more direct and consequential connections with one another. Writing developed
in Mesopotamia and Egypt at about the same time and there may have been a
diffusion of the idea of two-dimensional systems of symbolic codes (writing) in
one direction or both. This would indicate that the information networks and
the prestige goods networks were already connected. This raises the possibility
that the cycles of rise and fall and the growth of cities may have become
synchronized in the two core regions.

Research has demonstrated this
phenomenon for the later cases of East and West Asia between 600 BCE and 1500
CE (Chase-Dunn, Manning and Hall 2000; Chase-Dunn and Manning 2002).These were two distant core regions linked
by a prestige goods network, but they had no direct political/military
interaction.This synchronization of
East and West Asian city growth/decline phases and the rise and fall of large
states has been tested and retested and now begins to assume the status of a
fact. It was a similar situation in some ways to the relationship between
Mesopotamia and Egypt before 1500 BCE. Two separate agrarian core regions were
trading prestige goods with one another, and much of the intervening territory
was inhabited by nomadic pastoralists.

Regarding the hypothesis of
Mesopotamian/Egyptian synchrony, Chase-Dunn and Hall (2000: 105) examined
estimates of the population sizes of cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt based on
data from Chandler (1987) and the territorial sizes of empires from Taagepera
(1978a, 1978b). They found little support for the synchronization
hypothesis.Table 1 below replicates
that earlier effort by supplementing the Chandler (1987) data with estimates
from Modelski (2003) and with an improved method of detrending. The empire size
data are from Taagepera.

Although these data still contain the same
reliability limitations as previous estimates of urban populations, Modelski’s
compendium represents the most complete and current compilation of urban
populations.Modelski began with
Chandler’s compendium of urban populations and then expanded and improved the
coverage using newer and more recent historical information.Using Modelski’s data set we have enlarged
our data set for Egyptian and Mesopotamian cities from 7 to 23 time points in
the Egyptian PMN and from 16 time points to 25 time points in Mesopotamia.

City-to-city
correlations across PMNs

Region

Pearson’s r

Sig. Lev.

N

Years

Egypt-Mesop

0.073

0.370

23

2800 B.C.E. - 400
B.C.E.

Egypt-Mesop

0.152

0.348

9

2800 B.C.E. - 1500
B.C.E.

Egypt-Mesop

0.177

0.264

15

1500 B.C.E. - 400
B.C.E.

Empire-to-empire
correlations across PMNs

Region

Pearson’s r

Sig. Lev.

N

Years

Egypt-Mesop

-0.086

0.344

24

2800 B.C.E. - 400
B.C.E.

Egypt-Mesop

-0.140

0.350

10

2800 B.C.E. - 1500
B.C.E.

Egypt-Mesop

-0.049

0.432

15

1500 B.C.E. - 400
B.C.E.

*

Pearson's r significant at the 0.05 level.

**

Pearson's r significant at the 0.01 level.

Table 1:
Mesopotamian and Egyptian City and Empire Correlations based on Percentage
Change Scores For Different Time Periods

We tested the hypothesis of
synchrony of growth and decline between Egyptian and Mesopotamian city sizes
and empires sizes using the percentage change score. The change score
methodology was used to rule out the long-term secular increase in city and
empire sizes. The synchrony hypothesis is about the phase relationships among
medium-run growth/decline phases. A simple bivariate correlation between
regions would necessarily be positive in part due to the long-run secular
upward trend. In our earlier work we detrended by calculating a partial
correlation that controls for time. But this presumes that the long-term trend
is linear, while observations of city and empire growth suggest a long-term
accelerating increase. Detrending with percentage change scores does not
presume the shape of the long-term trend. The percentage change score is
calculated as follows: %Δ = (T2-T1/T1)/N where N in the number of decades
comprising interval T. The latter term is necessary because the intervals
between measurement time points are not always of equal lengths.

None
of the correlation coefficients in Table 1 are statistically significant,
confirming our earlier finding of no support for the hypothesis of synchrony
between Mesopotamia and Egypt. We examine three different time periods, and
find no synchrony for any of them.

Figures 3 and 4 display the raw size data for the largest
cities and the largest empires in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Figure 3:
Largest Cities in Egypt and Mesopotamia from 2800 BCE to 430 BCE

Figure 4:
Largest Empires in Egypt and Mesopotamia from 2800 BCE to 430 BCE

The
question of synchrony and the causes of rise and fall and urban growth/decline
phases in early state systems will require further empirical examination.Both the city and territorial size data sets
need to be improved by correcting mistakes and adding data from recently
published studies. Even though there is little indication of
Mesopotamian/Egyptian inter-regional synchrony, it remains possible that
climate change and interactions with peripheral nomads can explain the cyclical
patterns in each that are revealed in Figures 3 and 4.

There
is considerable support for cycles of rise and fall and sequences of trade
expansion and contraction in the Bronze Age and early Iron Age world-systems.
The hypotheses of semiperipheral development is confirmed for some instances of
tranformation, but not for others. We have presented a strong case for the
importance of interactions with nomads and the likelihood that climate change
has played an important role in the processes of uneven development in the
prehistoric and early state-based world-systems.

Bibliography

Adams, Robert McCormick 1965 Land Behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the

Diyala Plains.Chicago:University of Chicago
Press.

____________1966 The
Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic

Mexico.Chicago:
Aldine.

____________1981 Heartland
of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on

the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

____________1984 "Mesopotamian social evolution: old
outlooks, new goals."Pp. 79-

129 in Timothy Earle (ed.) On
the Evolution of Complex Societies: Essays in

Honor of Harry Hoijer.Malibu, CA.: Undena Publications.

Adams, Robert McCormick and Hans Nissen 1972 The Uruk Countryside.Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

Algaze, Guillermo1993 The
Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early

Mesopotamian Civilization Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

________ 2000 “The prehistory of imperialism:
the case of Uruk period

Mesopotamia”
in M. Rothman.(ed.) Uruk Mesopotamia and
its

Neighbors:
Cross-cultural Interactions and their Consequences in the Era of

_____.1987a."The Use and Abuse of World Systems Theory:the Case of the

'Pris­tine' West Asian State."Pp. 1-35 in Archeological Advances in Method and Theory

11:1-35.New York:Academic Press.

_____.1987b. "The Ancient Economy,
Transferable Technologies and the Bronze

Age
World-system:A View from the
Northeastern Frontier of the Ancient Near East."Pp. 13-24 in Centre and
Periphery in the Ancient World, edited by Michael Rowlands, Mogens Larsen
and Kristian Kristiansen.Cambridge:Cambridge University
Press.

Kohl, Philip L.
and Rita P. Wright.1977."Stateless Cities: The Differentiation
of Societies in the Near Eastern Neolithic."Dialectical Anthropology
2:271-283.

Lamberg-Karlovsky,
C. C.1975."Third Millennium Modes of Exchange and Modes of
Production."Pp. 341-368 in Ancient Civilization and Trade, edited
by J. A. Sabloff and C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky.Albuquerque:University of New
Mexico Press.

Larsen, Mogens Trolle 1976 The Old Assyrian City-State and Its Colonies. Copenhagen:

Akadmisk Forlag.

Larsen, Mogens
Trolle.1987."Commercial Networks in the Ancient Near East."Pp. 47-56 in Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World, edited by Michael
Rowlands, Mogens Larsen, and Kristian Kristiansen.Cambridge:Cambridge
University Press.

_____.1992."Commercial Capitalism in a World System of the Early Second
Millennium B.C."Paper presented
at International Studies Association, Atlanta, GA.

Lerro, Bruce 2000 From Earth-Spirits to Sky-Gods. Lexington
Press.

Mann, Michael.
1986.The Sources of Social Power:A
History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760.Cambridge:Cambridge
University Press.

Marfoe, Leon 1987
"Cedar forest and silver mountain: social change and the development of
long-distance trade in early Near Eastern societies," Pp. 25-35 in M.
Rowlands et al Centre and Periphery in
the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McNeill, William
H. 1963 The Rise of the West.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Renfrew, Colin
R.1975."Trade as Action at a Distance:Questions of Integration and Communication."Pp. 3-59 in Ancient Civilization and Trade, edited by J. A. Sabloff and C. C.
Lamborg‑Karlovsky.Albuquerque,
NM:University of New Mexico Press.

Zagarell,
Allen.1986."Trade, Women, Class and Society in Ancient Western

Asia."Current Anthropology
27:5(Dec.):415-430.

[1] An apparently somewhat similar world-system of
sedentary foragers existed in Northern California until the gold rush of CE
1849 (Chase-Dunn and Mann 1998).

[2]A state
is here understood as a specialized administrative apparatus of regional
control that is at least partially independent of kinship organization.

[3] Flannery (1998:18) makes a big point that Lagash,
one of the Mesopotamian states has three cities as well as 20 towns and 40
villages, and so he contests the characterization of Mesopotamian states as
city-states.Van de Mieroop (199x)
makes the point that these states were city states because political
organization was physically and institutionally structured around the main
city.

[4] But this
relationship does not hold in some other regional systems, including Egypt. See
Chase-Dunn, Alvarez and Pasciuti (forthcoming).

[5] Our study of
the Indic interstate system (Chase-Dunn, Manning and Hall 2000) found no
correlation between power configurations and empire sizes in that region.

[6]Though Egypt formed a core-wide empire early on,
it continued to experience cycles of political centralization and
decentralization just as other state systems do.

[7] Dilmun, a maritime trading
center somewhere in the Persian Gulf (probably Bahrein or Oman) that engaged in
the carrying trade between Mesopotamia and the Indus valley civilization, may
have been an earlier example.

[8] Gil Stein
applies the concept of “trade diaspora” in a somewhat different way to apply to
trading enclaves set up by the Uruk core state
to supply itself with certain goods from a distant region. Curtin’s original
idea applied to culturally specialized trading ethnicities rather than to trade
outposts of urbanized core societies.

[9] Another instance of this kind of niche switching
is the case of Hannibal. The Phoenicians had for centuries pursued the maritime
capitalist city state strategy in which they combined merchant capitalism with
production capitalism by manufacturing profitable products for the carrying
trade.Hannibal abandoned the trading
strategy for the marcher state approach and he nearly succeeded in conquering
Rome. The reticence of the Carthaginians, not fully convinced of the wisdom of
territorial conquest, to support his venture in a crucial period was a main
cause of its failure.

[10]This is why nomadic conquests are short-lived and
more last empires are erected by nomadic peoples who have settled down on the
edges of core regions and acquired some of the organizational can cultural
attributes of core power.